Keep your old car to reduce being tracked

Our Take

The channel Digital ID, Mass Surveillance and Digital Currency makes a fair point: newer cars are rolling data centers, phoning home your location, driving habits, and sometimes even audio to manufacturers and whoever they sell it to. Ditching that connected-car telemetry by driving something older is a reasonable move if you're trying to claw back some privacy from the dashboard up.

But here's the catch our readers already know: Flock Safety's ALPR network doesn't care what year your car is or whether it has a cellular modem. A 1998 Civic and a 2025 Tesla get the same treatment — plate photographed, timestamped, geotagged, and stored, often for months, shared across a web of local police departments and federal agencies with minimal oversight. The 'old car' trick might blunt one surveillance vector, but it does nothing to stop the camera bolted to the pole at the end of your street from building a permanent record of everywhere you drive.

That's the blind spot in a lot of digital-privacy advice: it treats cars like their only risk is the tech inside them, when the bigger threat is the infrastructure watching from outside. Check our map to see how many of these cameras are already logging plates in your area, and head to take action if you want to push back on your local government's ALPR contracts.